Encounterculture

A Night Out

I give up: having seen the Scissor Sisters live, I can't imagine that there's anything I can tell you about the band that you don't already know. Their pop songs sound catchy as all fuck in a live mix (less tight, mind you, so "Laura" isn't the slice of Max Martinesque perfect pop that it is on the album, but I freaked the hell out when they started playing it so let's not split hairs), their disco songs sound motherfucking reTARtedly great live, and if you think you're going to see them live without confronting the fact that the bulk of their appeal is to Gay Homosexuals, you should probably stay home and stick to your Korn records. And yet this is all stuff which I can't imagine being a secret to anyone who's ever heard them play music before, or read pretty much anything ever written on them by anyone ever.

But you'd think that would kind of be the point. If there is one thing I hate hate hate about seeing bands play live, it is the self-conscious Giving of Self by the artists, and I know you know what I mean: the eyes-closed arms-outstretched this-is-my-soul fart stench that wafts through so many bands shows (although I may just be hypersensitive to this having spent my teenage years in proximity to the Emo Capital of the 90s), or the other side of the coin, the self-conscious tarting up of a song with stage trickery. When I go to see Franz Ferdinand, I go specifically to hear them play "Darts of Pleasure", not to see them all retreat into a spotlight during the build just to explode into the air with the seeming intent of setting the population of the room's crotches ablaze, and yet that's what I get. I like Franz Ferdinand a whole lot and I love "Darts of Pleasure" a whoooooooooooole lot, but Rip Fucking Off.

Rock is not performance, unless of course you happen to believe that rock is best personified by Paul Stanley dressing up like a star-cat or whatever the hell his get-up is. Rock, rather, is the act of giving translated into music, which is close to performance in a lot of ways but completely different in most of the important ones. It's the difference between someone who wants Very Very Badly to read you their poetry and someone who organically says poetic things in the course of regular life, and if you can't tell the difference between those two categories then you probably fall into the first one. And yet the discourse of rock music has been overtaken by the poetry readers and the performers, by the Dashboards and the Darknesses and the Creeds and the Tools and the Vines and such, and consequently it gets harder and harder to separate the Cray-Zee Antix from the legitimate acts of Anarchic Rock Generosity that gave shape to the few genuine kickass Rock And Or Roll shows that I've been to.

I think the key word there is "generosity", because the truly great rock stars give and give to you, and not because they've already got your money and want to send you home with a good show - they give to you because you're there, and they just want to react to the music just like you. I always found it kind of quaint that people were so shocked by Iggy Pop slashing himself open on stage back in the day because violence is a perfectly legitimate response to the music for Iggy was fronting; those horrified people got nothing out of Iggy's blood that they couldn't have just as easily gotten from a copy of Raw Power. It's that consistency that makes a rockstar. Nobody wants to hear the Strokes just play their songs; they want to see the Strokes for themselves, to see if their rep in the press and the attitude they push in their music for being recalcitrant, snarky little jackasses who have an iron grip on the nutsack of your attention is real or just a put-on, and when it turns out to be legit, when the band gets in an argument on-stage and Julian starts cracking jokes about sandwiches and 90210, the crowd goes berzerk for it. Nobody wants to believe that the music they love comes off the rack; they want something real, and stage blood is a goddamn insult.

**********

I have to admit that my confidence level regarding the Scissor Sisters was not high going into the Troubador. The day before, I had been going through the same exact conversation with Michelle about the oncoming show that I'd been having with everyone else; I would express my apprehension, and the other person would ask why, and I would make all sorts of tasteless grinning jokes about The Gay Homosexuals ("The Scissor Sisters! In fucking WEST HOLLYWOOD! At the fucking TROUBADOR under the shade of that 'Mr. Gay' billboard!" etc) because anyone who knows me even a little bit is well aware of the depths of my inability to give a fuck about who or what anyone else does with their equipment. Michelle, to her immense credit and my immense discomfort, was having none of it, and kept refusing to let me off the hook of perceived homophobia before brilliantly coming to the conclusion that I was probably just nervous because it was a new crowd, and that I'm not really ever eager to dive into any new crowd period. She was right, of course - I was just as uncomfortable seeing the Like at the Troubador, and that show was populated almost entirely by loathesomely showy Silverlake scenesters - but for some reason that conversation stayed with me, basically up until the moment the Scissor Sisters actually took the stage.

I will cop to being afraid that this would be another in an ever-growing list of concerts where I'd gone and seen a fine show and then gone to another one, largely because I was so convinced that my straightness was going to be totally incompatible with the vibe of the place and that I'd just stand there appreciating like a jackass. It's just that there are few things I hate at concerts more than those people flagrantly trying to stake a claim to the responsibility for the good time, like the giant landcow who started bellowing "ORR YOO READY TO DANCE?!??!" at everyone at the Franz Ferdinand show. I wanted to see the Scissor Sisters because I love that fucking album (right now I'm going around calling it my favorite album of the year, although since both LCD Soundsystem and Gabriel & Dresden are supposed to be releasing albums I don't expect that to stick), and I had adamantine confidence that it'd be a lot of fun to hear it live, but at the same time I deeply didn't want to turn the concert into a field trip or ignore a crucial part of their music - namely their enthusiasm for the cock - in the interest of having some of a good time.

Well, good thing for me I'm an idiot, because the motherfucking Scissor Sisters came to play some motherfucking music for a bunch of people who wanted to hear it and have a great motherfucking time doing it. Within five seconds of their first song - they opened with "Take Your Mama", which at least locally is the equivalent of the Rapture opening with "House of Jealous Lovers" - two things became patently obvious: one it was really easy to tell who was jus there to Make Their Presence Known At This Scene, and two, the Scissor Sisters are really fucking great at being rockstars.

When I say that rockstars are supposed to be generous, I mean it; you can't hold anything back from the audience if they want it. What this particular audience really wanted was some good old-fashioned hamming about, resulting in costumes a-plenty (notably Jake Shears' full-on Wild West getup and Ana Matronic's boob-retention/highlighting thing which never seemed more than a lunge away from catastrophe) and self-indulgent yet witty interludes about New York and trannies and such. What all audiences, however, want from their rockstars is to hear them play the shit out of the songs they love like they mean it, and that is precisely what the Sisters went out there to do. You fucking wouldn't believe the setlist these guys threw together; I've seen world-class DJs pale in comparison. Opening with their hit song, then launching straight off into the most similar song on the album ("Better Luck"), for instance, was pretty much good enough for me to begin with, even if I was nitpicking at the time, but then they decided that the crowd wanted to go insane and launched into the disco stretch.

Think about that for a minute. Imagine being in that club, in that crowd, with that band telling everyone to pretend that "it's 1979, and the floor has the most amazing lights, and you've got on your brand new just-bought-for-cash leisure suit", and they start playing their disco songs. Imagine, those of you who've heard the album, the explosive release as everyone just started cutting loose to "Filthy/Gorgeous"; imagine hearing murderously effective non-album disco shit which was actually better than %90 of the album proper; imagine - oh god oh god oh god -Shears slowing it down with "Mary" only, during the break for applause, launching into COMFORTABLY FUCKING NUMB, the reason I'd ever heard of the Scissor Sisters in the first place, and you have no fucking idea how much better it sounds with live drums. Seriously. Two years ago, I went to Koreatown with a bunch of people to watch Korea play Spain during the World Cup, and when they won, I saw the streets run riot with the most enviably joyful people I've ever come across until last Tuesday night.

THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is what Rock Stars should do, and that is why we have Rock Stars in the first place. Rock music is fundamentally about honesty, but what rarely gets mentioned is that real rock music calls on the honesty of the audience by posing the question "Do you like this? []Yes [] No" as plainly as possible. You answer honestly, you get something of your own worth keeping and that you don't mind sharing with anyone else answering honestly. The genius of the Scissor Sisters, I think, is that they know how to make the music do that by ornamenting their songs with sounds and structures that have absolutely nothing to do with the hilarious straightwhiteyoungmale demographic pushed on The MTV and The ClearChannel, so that in theory, by the time you get to the concert you know what the deal is and you're ready for it all. And then they fucking give it to you, and they don't give a fuck what you are - straight, gay, trisexual, whatever; if you think that seeing a guy leap around a small stage while wailing on a cowbell like he had something to prove sounds like something worth seeing, then you're about to have a motherfucking Time, because they give you all of that you have. They're not giving you themselves, they're not putting on a show, they're doing something for you, something which wouldn't be totally complete without your presence, because otherwise who'd be there to remember it and tell everyone else? That is rock and fucking roll, guys. I don't care if they play disco songs about man-fucking with hilarious laser noises and nut-shattering falsettos, that's way more rock and motherfucking roll than anything Mudvayne will ever put out.

You should probably go see them if you get the chance. I think.

AAAAAAAAAH
 
Just so y'all are in sync with me: thanks to my job, I have now seen a disquietingly close-up picture of a man without a penis right as "Mighty Real" by Sylvester peaks on my headphones.

Needless to say, I hate my job so very very much.

In which I capitulate and try to start a blogmeme

So. A few nights ago, I ended up at a roller skating rink of all places for my friend Deidre's birthday. Before you ask: yes I did skate, yes I did fall and bust my ass, yes I'm sure it was hilarious to watch, and yes I will kill you where you stand if you give me shit for it. Imagine trying to balance a stack of four or five large pizzas on the tip of a pool cue and you've got a pretty respectable analogue for what it must have looked like to watch me on goddamn roller skates. Let's not make a thing out of it.

(I take solace, however, in the knowledge that my comical flailings were NO MATCH WHATSOEVER for the hilarity of the people there who actually knew how to skate. Keep in mind that this place had designated Tuesday night as "Adult Skate Night", meaning that a bunch of Valley denizens crawled out of their meth labs to hit the roller rink and show their shit off. Unfortunately for them, I was there to point and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and preserve their presence for posterity and then go back to laughing, thus entering into the record the presence of:

1. The unexpected exuberance of the guy who looked like the world-weary lovechild of an unholy tryst between Rob Halford and John Malkovich. In all fairness, he was less comical than most and probably would have escaped my Spidey Sense for Hilarity had he not tried to run skate-rink game on Michelle earlier in the night, thus prompting me to take every opportunity to point out the moves of her gentleman caller. He was rockin' out. It was fuckin' funny.

2. The woman who, upon hitting the rink with all the dead-eyed idle intensity of a hooker lining up at the free clinic, prompted a flurry of Courtney Love comments from everyone else, flat-out beating me to jokes that I'm still mad at myself for not making (although in the spirit of accuracy, she looked less like Courtney Love than a rode hard and put away wet Lita Ford, which is saying something).

3. Spinning Man, my personal favorite. Every so often, Spinning Man would seize the center of the rink and do the most gut-bustingly sinciere twirl taken from ice skating* that you can possibly imagine, and yes, all the appropriate Graceland jokes were made ("Good lord, he's spinning to infinity! Does he have a baboon heart?") Furthermore, when he was REALLY feeling his oats, he'd bust out this TREMENDOUS leap into the air and then go into the spin, and of course you wouldn't be reading a blog entry if he didn't fall in classic fashion (my exact words to Michelle: "Oh yeah, time to be mean-spirited.") What you DON'T know about the situation is that I swear before God and all the angels that this guy had to be the long-lost brother of that guy who buys all those beef jerky sticks in Ghost World, down to the indeterminable stains all over his wifebeater (my best guess was coffee, although how someone can manage to spill coffee into a lopsided triforce on their back is beyond my powers of understanding). I will be eternally grateful to my self-preservation drive for keeping me from going up to him after the rink closed down and going "WHOO! Gawdayum, that done lef'me tahrd! I'm 'bout hungry 'nuff to chew the crotch out of a ragdoll!" and such. I leave the decision as to which was the funniest in your hands, Gentle Reader, although you know how I'm betting.)

BUT I DIGRESS.

What was perhaps most striking about the whole experience, however, was the unearthly familiarity of the rink. Now I have neither been to nor thought about a skating rink in well over a decade, but even so, y'know, the world's changed a lot; I guess I kinda assumed that skating rink technology would have taken a correlative Great Leap Forward (I mean fuck, they've even figured out ways to gussy up bowling). But it was fucking uncanny; I walked through those doors and stepped back into middle school, albeit without the packs of kids decked out in floodwaters and giant shirts with g'd up Looney Tunes characters throwing poses (and yes I had one and yes so did you so shut the fuck up). The skates were all the same, the video games were all the same (I had honestly forgotten that that crappy Simpsons game existed, but there it was, waiting to ambush me), and of course the music was absofuckinggoddamncanyounotseeIamseriouslutely the same (with the surprising exception of the Basement Jaxx' "Red Alert"). I mean, I'd have to mark the time in years between occasions on which I hear Montell Jordan's "This Is How We Do It", but yep, there it was. I half-expected myself to go home and google Erin Becker just for old time's sakes.

As you might expect, it took about three songs before my Arrogant Nerd Reflexes took over. "Self", I thought to myself, "you know and I know that it's time for a change; a roller-change. Yes, 'Brick House' is a fine song, but dammit, you could do better. Go thee to the blogosphere and make thee a list of, oh, let's say twenty songs that you would play at your own personal roller-skating rink, and don't forget to denote songs for all the stupid shit like Backwards Skating and Couples Skating and so on. And keep in mind that you have to play to The People, so don't go running off to throw together a playlist full of Black Dice and John Cale and Suicide. And don't forget that you still have to mail off your check for your dental insurance." And I stood up and said YES in the scene that played out in my mind, and thus came up with:

HIPSTER ROLLER DISCO
(a work in progress)

1. Eddie Holman, "This Will Be A Night To Remember" 
2. Notorious B.I.G., "Mo' Money, Mo' Problems"
3. Dexy's Midnight Runners, "Come On Eileen"
4. Dogs Die In Hot Cars, "Godhopping"
5. Basement Jaxx, "Plug It In" 

(Over the PA: "Awweh, then effu sons arkabefr bagwods-skaying! Yeah! Cleedefor ifu dunno hoto bagwa-skay! Annnnd...yeah! Bagwads! Awright!")

6. Babe Ruth, "The Mexican"
7. Donna Summer, "Upside Down"
8. Gloria Jones, "Tainted Love"

(Over the PA: "Annow wr baga reg'ar skaying! Eeveeboduh go thuruglar way!")

9. Metric, "Dead Disco"
10. The Strokes, "Last Nite" (a roller-skating anthem waiting to happen and you all motherfucking KNOW it)
11. The Happy Mondays, "Tart Tart" 
12. The Scissor Sister, "Comfortably Numb" 
13. Stevie Wonder, "Superstition" 
14. Andre 3000, "Hey Ya" (GEEV THE PEEPLES WHAT ZEY WANT, I guess. But Hey Ya still rules and I don't care how many parents love it.)

(Over the PA: "Arrite, nowwurgana playsim sohns juffurfa cubbles! (uncomfortable pause Roggon!")
(lights get embarassingly dim, feels are shamelessly copped)

15. Oasis, "Don't Look Back In Anger" (ah, memories)
16. David Gray, "Say Hello Wave Goodbye"
17. Israel what's-his-face, "Somewhere Over The Rainbow/What A Wonderful World"

(Over the PA: "Okee, thabaduzzit furgupillskayeen! Annnow wegoh taykit on nome!")

18. LCD Soundsystem, "Beat Connection" (and because I am a sadist I would play all nine minutes of it. And I guarangoddamntee you that it'd get people up.)
19. The Fox, "Ride On" (ATOC dub)
20. Double Exposure, "My Love Is Free" (the Tom Moulton mix)

So, uh, yeah. That happened. Discuss amongst yourselves.

(and FYI, I haven't forgotten about the real-time project; my monitor on my home computer just died so I have to fix that before I can write anything thurr. Content forthcoming, usual excuses, etc etc etc.)

*I forget the actual name of the move because freestyle snowboarding aside, the Winter Olympics are for suckers. In a perfect world, the Winter Olympics would just be the exact same games of the Summer Olympics, just held on ice. You KNOW you want to watch Ice Javelin and Ice Boxing and Ice Baseball and such. You KNOW it.

There is always the temptation to just say fuck it and start getting high. When one can’t figure out a way to speak about something, pot makes you hypersensitive to yourself; if you know how to write and you like to smoke weed, your internal monologue will suddenly become the richest, saddest, most profound string of words ever sewn together by man, to the point where the fact that you get to hear it more than makes up for the fact that nobody else does. Some people will of course offhandedly characterize this as self-pity, to which my only response is that they’re absolutely fuckin’ right, and that that’s the whole point. You get high when you feel like nobody gives a shit about what you think or want because it’s easy and satisfying and seemingly bears no consequences if you have no interest in seeing the northern side of thirty.

Today was one of those sad, pathetic days that only seems to lead to bad poetry. In between all manner of shit, I almost wish I’d just done what I normally do and said Fuck It, Let’s Drown Our Sorrows In An Acrid Blue Cloud Hanging Between Me And Love Actually For The Eight Billionth Time, but for some reason I can’t seem to do it, because simply put I want very much to write about the Beach Boys’ masterpiece Surf’s Up and I cannot for the life of me settle on an approach that feels like anything other than saying smart shit to show off how smart I am. (I am confident, for instance, that you don’t care about the Beach Boys’ use of declarative statements as the hinges on which their songs turn, and I’ve got three false starts to prove it.)

But the facts of the matter, or the matter of Surf’s Up at least, are as follows: holy hell, that album just couldn’t sound sadder. If there’s a pair of words delivered more poignantly in the canon of music made by man than the titular words in the titular track, I wanna fuckin’ hear ‘em, because that shrugging little sigh of a “Surf’s up” just wrecks me, every time; it sounds like surrender in the same way that Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” sounds like death, in that it finds the profound beauty in the neutrality of release and stays on it like a shark that’s smelled blood. And I want to know if it’s even possible to sing a song like “Disney Girls” while looking someone dead in the face, or if, as I suspect, you have to look up and over them, staring out into empty-ass nothingness. I want to know how angry you have to be in order to be in the Motherfucking Beach Boys and open your album with a few seconds of off-key piano noodling before sliding out the line “Don’t go near the water”. I want to know whose brilliant idea it was to have a synth that’s aged shamefully poorly by this point carry the burden of exuberance for the hypnotically beautiful “Feel Flows”. I want, in short, to write about Surf’s Up because neither the fact that it’s an otherworldly piece of work nor the fact that the world I live in can really kiss my ass sometimes can keep me from connecting with it, and as previously outlined, when you are a miserable motherfucker you want a connection and any port in a storm etc.

Is great music great simply because we can connect to it? And if so, isn’t that an awfully limited definition of greatness? When I was in late middle/early high school, my favorite album ever was You’d Prefer An Astronaut by Hum, but listening to it now it seems depressingly apparent that most of what made it so great to me back then was its capacity to overwhelm me with sonic textures in a rock context; to say that the same exact stuff barely manages to whelm me now would be a gross overstatement. And yet that doesn’t diminish my confidence in the album’s greatness for a moment, even if it’s just in the clinical and abstract. When an album shakes you to the core like that one did, you tend to get the hint.

I’ve been listening to Surf’s Up a whole lot recently, probably in part because I’m a sad, predictable bastard and it’s stuffed with great, profound songs about loss and aging and regret and death, and dammit that sounds about right by now. And yet oddly, what I personally take away from the album has less to do with the album’s content itself than with my own personal interactions with the content. Would I give a shit about the “Surf’s Up” in “Surf’s Up” if I didn’t have a wide field of unworthy challengers for the emotional chord it strikes? It’s possible – music comes from life, and life is always a context – but it’s highly unlikely at the ass-best that I’d give the kind of shit I give about it now. Right now I’m fully willing to bray like a jackass about how Surf’s Up is making me platoon my absolute favorite albums so that I don’t have to choose between them like I’ve settled in to doing with movies (since it would take the collapse of heaven and earth to make me decide which is the best movie between The Passion of Joan of Arc, Playtime, and Sullivan’s Travels), and as much as we’d like to think otherwise, the truth is that that kind of motivation rarely comes out of nowhere.

Of course, none of that has anything to do with why I can’t write about it: simply put, my most honest critical evaluation of this album would be me yelling like a Zeppelin fan, complete with humorously labored syllable accentuation patterns (“NO MAennnnnnnnnnnh, just LISsen to the FUHcking MYOOsick, MAAAAAAAAaaaan! It’s INN there! Really! Stairway!”). There comes a point when a man has to face up to his limitations, so here’s me giving it a shot: I don’t know shit about music. I took piano lessons for a few months, guitar for a few lessons, never played in a band, never worked with a band, never even had a band that I followed religiously (although I’ve had more than my share of bands for whom I reveled in the sense of cool satisfaction of knowing I was getting exactly what I wanted from their music). What I get from music is unfettered connection, and I am unable to muster up a sufficient Boner of Personal Pride to convince other people to follow in my footsteps, which, at the end of the day, is pretty much how I would describe the field of criticism which I love and loathe equally and simultaneously. I have nothing to say about the music of Surf’s Up beyond various GodDamnThat’sGoodities; only that it exists and I get a giant spiritual kick from it, a kick with at least enough force to trigger my aspirant writer. Whether that means something to you – well, that’s your hill to climb.

But I will say this: as long as I’ve been reading music criticism, I’ve noticed the trend that whenever people start to talk about the music that they think is truly great (and, to be fair, truly shitty too), they inevitably slip over into self-analysis, either subconsciously or not. Call me a poststructuralist assface if you must, but I stand by it: language is so heavily coded that the simple act of using it absolutely constitutes political action. Therefore it does mean something when, for instance, so many reviews of the Scissor Sisters debut tour de force revolve around describing the album’s dual poles of humor and modern decadent culture, as if it’s impossible to reconcile being gay with being funny. People like to think that simply because they have so much access to music (and movies, and books, and you know the drill by now), they’re smarter than the music, but the cold truth is that that’s very, very rarely true. The fact that Brent DiCrescenzo is more creatively obtuse at hiding his victimization doesn’t make him any less of one.

I think, then, that I’ll be tempted to write about musical experiences stroke albums like Surf’s Up for the rest of my life simply because they cut through all the bullshit. When I listen to Surf’s Up, it’s in control – yes, not the same steady measure of control the whole time, and no, the center won’t necessarily hold forever and eventually I’ll get bored and move on to something else, but what the hell. Sure, I may well end up taking it back in a few years like I did with hum, but truth be told, if I’d died in some pathetically comical fashion in the ninth grade (“Local Long-Haired Oaf Literally Crushed Under Weight Of Self-Importance (Pictures, p. G19)”) with You’d Prefer An Astronaut as my favorite album, that probably would have been the least of my worries. If you’re not a musician, you’re a music consumer, so own the fuck up to it when you talk about stuff, I guess.

Aargh. Whatever. Long story short: Surf’s Up is one hell of an album.

And I’m off to the races.

Hey Kids, Let’s Play That Real-Time Game Againe

Ah, Los Angeles. What the hell I’m doing in a city where coolness is so pronounced that you can pinpoint the exact location where a street goes from Ghetto As Fuck to Hey, Rich People Live Here down to a matter of houses is beyond me, but ours not to reason why. As a non-cool (read: poor/cheap) citizen, of course, my typical recourse is to make bitter fun of the cool motherfuckers, and seeing as how I already did that to the British half a year ago, I figure that the interest of fairness demands me to spit venom at my adopted city. Hence: Indy 103’s playlist.

Indy 103, for those of you who don’t read Rolling Stone, is apparently “the coolest radio station in America”, although in keeping true with the bell curve of coolness I want to make it absolutely clear that it came to my attention as a radio station back when it was playing the absolute worst dance music on the earth. But now of course they’re REBELS! who don’t cotton to that Clurr Chan’l boolsheeit, and everyone out here fucking loves them, giving them credit for pushing KROQ to play new stuff and breaking new artists left and right and such.

Upfront, of course, I want to say that my grapes will probably seem more sour than they actually are; it’s not a bad station or anything, just one that, by virtue of my working inside a windowless concrete box that doesn’t require a long drive in the mornings, I don’t get to participate in fully. Really, I’m just curious; given that this station really is getting a lot of credit among my friends who don’t devote every second of every day to tracking down new stuff for work-listening, I’d just like to know how adventurous their format really is. Which, of course, means: REAL TIME.

Those of you unfamiliar with the rules can check them out here; the only real change is that since there are like 50 songs on the current 103.1 playlist, I’m going to break this up into more manageable 10-song stretches. Consider this a work in progress.

OK GO.

5:38: [Go Betty Go, “C’mon”] Awwww…
5:38: Stupid Blondie being my frame of reference for all poppy Girl-punk groups. This sounds NOTHING like Blondie but that’s all I can think of.
5:39: Fuck, who does this sound like?
5:39: And yes, I am overwhelmingly confident that this will devolve into a contest to figure out who these bands all sound like. Ah, Los Angeles Hipster Radio
5:39: Please keep in mind that this isn’t bad in a Slightly More Rocking Letters To Cleo sort of way. But now I have the Distillers and not a whole lot of time for this.
5:40: There is a great essay waiting to be written in which the SoCal poppy punk sound is compared extensively to Motown. God knows they’ve both got a useful formula.
5:41: Yeah, this would have been my favorite song back in like eighth grade. Not that I would have told anyone, mind you. I’d have been all “NAW, FUCK THAT SHIT! Now where’d I put my Hum albums…”
5:41: PHONE
5:43: [Bumblebeez 81, “Pony Ride”] I don’t think I’m going to be able to avoid loving this song. FUCK
5:43: Yes it will pass very quickly but seriously. There’s not much to argue with – so classically Hipster in that “We Are Doing Everything The Opposite Of How It Sounds On The Radio” way
5:44: Maybe I just like this because of how much it sounds like LCD Soundsystem’s “Give It Up”. Which is odd since that’s the one [Velvet Revolver, “Slither”] LCD song that I don’t really care about.
5:45: Man, if it weren’t for Slash, this song would be just credible enough for a Jerry Bruckheimer end-credit sequence.
5:46: I’m wondering if this song is a hit solely for that one high guitar note hit during the chorus. Call it the Soft Cell effect. God knows stuff like that MAKES that Silures song, which is not on this playlist mind you.
5:47: Yes, I have already forgotten how the Bumblebeez song goes.
5:47: I actually want to talk more shit about this song than I can, to be perfectly honest. It’s not bad or anything and Lord knows I used to be the alpha-G’N’R fan so I want to talk shit about their side projects with the burning urgency, but this doesn’t even make the needle twitch.
5:49: Bands I would rather listen to than this: ELO.
5:49: [The Streets, “Fit But You Know It”] Whoa, what the hell is this beat? Am I about to hear “Parklife” all Just Blazed up?
5:50: I should probably mention that I don’t really like the Streets. I can’t shake my impression of them as the rap group that people who talk shit about Eminem like to prove that Yes They Like The Hip-Hop.
5:51: Quite a chorus, though.
5:52: And I think I read somewhere that this is a concept album, which makes me want to proceed rapidly in the opposite direction.
5:52: It also occurs to me that I might be less bored by this if I wasn’t Real-Timing it, as you can’t really pay attention to the lyrics. But such is life.
5:53: Mostly I just think I need to go download [The Sounds, “Living In America”] the damn Pretty Toney album already.
5:54: Man, last time I heard the Sounds was when they opened for the Strokes and I thought for furkin’ SURE that their lead singer was going to be the drunkest person there. Yes, I forgot who the lead singer of the Strokes was.
5:54: And this song fucking ROCKS in a shitty disposable way. Seriously. I fully admit that it’s just the Blondie fan in me (as well as that they really aren’t doing the Blondie thing at all, sans their image), but hell, hook-driven breathy-girl-sung rock music with an eye turned towards history gets my engine going. Who cares how overblown it is? I own a damn Journey album so fuck you.
5:56: AND THEY KNOW HOW TO DO A STADIUM ROCK BUILDUP YOW
5:56: Yes, this song was invented for me to howl along with it in my car.
5:56: Keep in mind that I heard this song for the first time on KROQ, and a year ago no less. Bleeding edge my ruby [Ozomatli, “Saturday Night”] starfruit.
5:57: OH WIN
5:57: Yeah, fuck all y’all, I still like the Jurassic Five sound too. I have no shame in liking my generation’s Whodini.
5:58: Keep in mind that I mean the above only insofar as that I have no idea who the guys rapping are. Multicultural Party Rap Beats 4 Lyfe, though.
5:59: It should, however, be pointed out that this is deeply, deeply music for privileged white people. I can probably count the number of Ozomatli shirts not accompanied by a soulpatch on one hand with fingers left over.
6:00: Okay, the rideout is reminding me to tell you all to go see Badassssssssss.
6:01: [The Stills, “Still In Love Song”] Again, this is hardly news.
6:01: And in a James Cobo Breaks With Nate Patrin Shocker, I also have to admit that I like this song. Considering how piss-poorly it does on the forest of mix CDs that I’ve burned for my car, I’m as confused as you are, but it really is quite a chours.
6:02: That being said, I am not at all convinced that my generation was crying out for an Echo and the Bunnymen to call their very own.
6:03: Man, a DFA remix of this song would be fucking funny and awesome and funny all at once.
6:03: Gotta love how they have like eight handclaps in the entire song (and all buried way in the back to boot). If you’re going to commit to rhythm, fucking DO IT.
6:04: Urgh, and here comes the Cure-ness.
6:04: It is a mystery to me as to why that song hasn’t been played on [Snow Patrol, “Spitting Games”] KROQ before.
6:05: FUCK ALL Y’ALL SNOW PATROL FUCKING RULES. I really do love this album and I give not a fuck who knows it. But this is like the fourth or fifth best song on the album at best.
6:05: And I don’t really get how they’ve gotten the Wussy Rock tag. I’d much rather see them painted with the Album Your Parents Find In Your CD Player When They Discover Your Dangling Corpse brush than that, since it actually makes sense like that.
6:06: Yeah, go listen to “Run” instead. Best Appease the Pre-Goth Middle-School Kids At A Dance song ever.
6:07: And I don’t need to point out how many factors of ten this is better than the Stills at their best. I like Ryan Adams but he needs to learn when truth is being told.
6:08: Oh, right, I am not a fan of this bathroom recording outro.
6:08: [Ben Kweller, “The Rules”] NO.
6:09: Okay, maybe not NO, but at least No.
6:09: It’s like everything I dislike about the Modern Lovers titrated down into one poontangly song.
6:10: Boy howdy this song didn’t need a “Whoo!”
6:10: Or a guitar solo. Ben Kweller, thou art not Molly Hatchet.
6:10: And last time I remember running across this guy, I seem to remember him being in full-on Why Aren’t I Ben Folds mode. But I do smoke a lot of pot, so I could be [The Cure, “The End Of The World”] wrong.
6:11: Good god, I hate everything.
6:11: It might be unfair that this is some shitty live recording but I am never in a mood to be fair to the Cure.
6:11: Okay, so far I haven’t been surprised by anything as Indy 103.1 is coming off like the Baskin Robbins of emo, a soft nurturing shoulder for the Sensitive Truckerhatter to lean upon if you weeeull. But it’s not like KROQ was that far off that description anyway.
6:13: This would be a lot better if it was a lot faster.
6:13: I’m not even going to try to reconcile the fact that I *hate* Robert Smith’s voice and like Luke Jenner’s now.
6:14: And I am taking stock of the fact that this showed up in the same 10-song block as Velvet Revolver. I am going to leave the task of tracing the connections between Rockin Rockers from Last Decade up to you.

And we’re done. Part 2 when I get around to it, as I still have every intention of writing about Fahrenheit 9/11 before the election that it won’t really influence rolls around.